A Strange Stirring by Stephanie Coontz The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s

In 1963, Betty Friedan unleashed a storm of controversy with her bestselling book, The Feminine Mystique. Hundreds of women wrote to her to say that the book had transformed, even saved, their lives. Nearly half a century later, many women still recall where they were when they first read it.

In A Strange Stirring, historian Stephanie Coontz examines the dawn of the 1960s, when the sexual revolution had barely begun, newspapers advertised for perky, attractive gal typists,” but married women were told to stay home, and husbands controlled almost every aspect of family life. Based on exhaustive research and interviews, and challenging both conservative and liberal myths about Friedan, A Strange Stirring brilliantly illuminates how a generation of women came to realize that their dissatisfaction with domestic life didn’t reflect their personal weakness but rather a social and political injustice.

Unrated Critic Reviews for A Strange Stirring

Kirkus Reviews

Psychologists and so-called experts often blamed the problem on the women themselves for their inability to conform, but Friedan diagnosed it presciently as the thwarting of “the need to grow and fulfill their potentialities as human beings.” In fact, there was a name for what was ailing American...

Publishers Weekly

Social historian Coontz (Marriage, a History) analyzes the impact of Betty Friedan's groundbreaking 1963 book, The Feminine Mystique, on the generation of white, middle-class women electrified by Friedan's argument that beneath the surface contentment, most housewives harbored a deep well of inse...

Book Forum

Coontz reconciles Friedan's flawed text with its seemingly outsized influence, and deftly depicts the social context for the dramatic testimonials uncovered in Coontz's research, the revelatory proto-feminist experiences shared by women of her mother's generation: "Women who told [her] over and o...

Book Forum

Coontz reconciles Friedan's flawed text with its seemingly outsized influence, and deftly depicts the social context for the dramatic testimonials uncovered in Coontz's research, the revelatory proto-feminist experiences shared by women of her mother's generation: "Women who told [her] over and o...

The Wall Street Journal

After growing up amid the hardships of the 1930s, and making sacrifices to support the nation’s all-out effort to win World War II, many families thought the cloistered suburban lives of the 1950s looked like a bonanza, Coontz explains in “A Strange Stirring,” a look at the impact of Betty Frieda...